Your project has a new regulator
On 1 July 2026, Australia’s National Environmental Protection Agency began work. The EPBC reform package, the overhaul of Australia’s national environment law, passed Parliament in late November 2025, received assent on 1 December, and its first big commencement date has now arrived: compliance and enforcement under national environment law sits with an independent regulator, alongside a new data agency, Environment Information Australia. The second tranche lands on 1 December 2026, bringing the streamlined approval pathways, greenhouse gas reporting requirements and bioregional planning provisions.
For anyone delivering a project under EPBC conditions, the approvals conversation will get most of the attention. The enforcement conversation deserves more of it.
What changed on 1 July
Three features of the new regulator matter for anyone delivering a project under EPBC conditions.
The first is stop-work power. The agency’s CEO can issue Environmental Protection Orders, and maximum civil penalties for corporations now reach the tens of millions of dollars. Law firm summaries have covered the numbers in detail; the practical point is that non-compliance can now stop work on site, and nothing costs a project more than lost time.
The second is audit reach. The new compliance audits need no prior notice and no stated reason. Under the old settings, a proponent usually had warning that scrutiny was coming. The working assumption now has to be that any day is audit day, which means condition compliance needs to be provable from your records as they stand this morning, not as they could be assembled over a fortnight.
The third has had the least coverage and may change behaviour most. The regulator must maintain published registers of its decisions, including enforcement outcomes. Non-compliance used to be a matter between you, the department and occasionally a journalist. It is becoming a public record that turns up when a community group, an investor or a future client searches your company’s name. Reputation risk and compliance risk have been merged, by legislation.
Why conditions fail on big projects
None of this would matter if approval conditions were reliably kept. I have spent more than 20 years advising mining, infrastructure and government organisations on delivering under exactly these kinds of obligations, and on large capital projects the mechanism of failure is rarely bad faith; it is handover.
The approvals team wins the conditions, celebrates, and moves to the next assessment. The delivery team inherits a conditions register it did not negotiate and does not fully understand, usually at the exact moment the project is resetting its budget and timeline. Value engineering, the routine hunt for cost savings in the design, then works through the scope, and environmental commitments, which sit in a different document from the contract, are easy to trim without anyone noticing. By year two, the register lives in a spreadsheet nobody owns, three revisions behind the actual approvals.
A sustainability manager, however capable, cannot fix this from the side. The fix is structural: conditions treated with the same discipline as contract obligations, owned by the delivery director, reported at the same meetings as cost and schedule, and flowed down into subcontracts explicitly. Frameworks like the Infrastructure Sustainability Council’s IS Rating Scheme help because they force exactly this integration, on a timetable, with external review.
What I would check before September
If I sat on a project board this month, I would want current answers to five questions:
- Is the conditions register complete against every approval document, including the variations?
- Who is named as owner of each condition, and do they know?
- Could we evidence compliance today, from existing records, if an auditor arrived unannounced?
- Do our subcontracts pass the relevant obligations down, or do they stop at our own front door?
- Who in the organisation is authorised to stop work on environmental grounds, before the regulator does it for us?
Five questions, one afternoon, and most project teams will find at least one uncomfortable answer. Better to find it than to have it published.
Frequently asked questions
What is the National Environmental Protection Agency?
It is Australia’s new independent national environmental regulator, created by the EPBC reform package passed in late 2025. It commenced operations on 1 July 2026, taking over compliance and enforcement of national environment law, with powers including stop-work orders, no-notice compliance audits and substantial civil penalties.
What changed on 1 July 2026?
The national regulator and Environment Information Australia both began operating, and enforcement functions transferred from the department to the regulator. Provisions covering streamlined approvals, greenhouse gas reporting and bioregional planning commence on 1 December 2026.
What is an Environmental Protection Order?
It is a stop-work instrument the regulator’s CEO can issue to halt activity causing or risking environmental harm. For project proponents, it converts environmental non-compliance into direct schedule risk, since work can be paused until the issue is addressed.
What should proponents do now?
Reconcile the conditions register against all current approvals, assign a named owner to every condition, confirm compliance can be evidenced from existing records without notice, check obligations flow down into subcontracts, and clarify internal authority to stop work on environmental grounds.
About the author
Monique Chelin is the author of ‘Enzo Finds His Friends’ and ‘Switch it On!’, with 100% of author profits supporting RSPCA Australia and Opportunity International Australia, where she has been an Ambassador since 2010. She is also a Brisbane-based sustainability consultant, board director (GAICD), and founder of MJC Sustainability, advising mining, infrastructure and government organisations on ESG risk. Connect with Monique at mjcsustainability.com.
